People bring food into work almost every day and send out emails saying "free cake in the kitchen" or "blueberries in the kitchen", etc. Well today one of the ladies upstairs sent the following email: "Cookies--you know where."
I just hope she's not a Limp Bizkit fan...
I went on a 45 mile bike ride over the weekend… I was beat by the time I got home. I rode out to Paia and got rained on. I ate a packed lunch at Baldwin Beach. I found a cool bike trail that runs along the back side of the airport. I watched TONS of windsurfers do their thing at Kanaha Beach (and now I want to take windsurfing lessons). And then I rode home with a pit stop at Haycraft Park in Ma’alaea. It was a very nice adventure!
I took a nap when I got home.
On Saturday, Kara and I did quite a bit of exploring Upcountry. We left the house around 9:15am and drove out to Kahului to check out the swap meet that goes on every Saturday morning. The stuff there was standard touristy crap mixed with some art and a farmer’s market section. It wasn’t that exciting, but it was worth the fifty cent admission.
After the swap meet, we drove out to Kanaha Beach because I wanted to show Kara the wind surfers. But we got there too early and there was only one windsurfer in the water... bummer.
We got back in the Jeep and headed out on Hana Highway toward Paia. When we got to Paia, we turned in on Baldwin Ave. because we planned on eating lunch at Hali’imaile General Store. We missed the turn and ended up in Makawao, so we went back on Haleakala Highway and found it from the other direction. But, the place was closed... I guess they aren’t open on the weekends. So, we drove back to Paia to eat at Cafe De Amis instead. The place had pretty tasty food; I got a shrimp and coconut curry wrap and Kara got a Mozzarella, Tomato, & Basil wrap.
After lunch we drove further east on Hana Highway and turned on Haiku Rd. We drove around on a bunch of the narrow, winding roads in Haiku and looked at all the pretty scenery. We eventually found our way to Kaupakalua Rd. and took it all the way to Makawao.
Once we got to Makawao (again) we parked the Jeep and walked around a bit. The sky above us was completely clear, but it was sprinkling anyway. It must have been raining somewhere nearby and the wind was blowing it over to Makawao. It was a weird experience. We looked at some shops and galleries, then got back in the Jeep and headed toward Kula.
We missed the turn to the Kula Botanical Gardens, but that was ok, because we ended up finding the Sun Yat Sen Park. The park was dedicated to a Chinese man (Sun Yat Sen) that came to Hawaii in the 1800’s to study English and then helped lead a revolution in China when he returned. The park had some cool Chinese statues that we took some pictures of.
We turned back the way we came, and this time found the turn to Haleakala Highway. We turned up Waipoli Rd and made a stop at the Lavender Farm, which is basically a place that grows tons of different types of lavender, and sells various lavender infused items (brownies, tea, shampoo, candles, etc). We walked around a bit and bought a candle... The view of the valley was incredible!!
After the lavender farm, we went to the Kula Botanical Garden. The place had a $7.50 admission fee, which seemed a little high, but we went anyway. It was worth it! There were lots of very neat flowers and plants that we had never seen before! Also, there were a few bird sanctuaries that had active birds and a cool Koi pond. It was a very neat place! We finished up at the Garden around 3:30pm, so we headed back home because Kara wanted to spend some time at the beach.
When we got home, we got all ready for the beach, and drove over to Wailea Beach. It was around 4:30pm by the time we got there, so it was not very warm… We waded out to our waists before we decided it was just too cold, and went back to shore. It was too cold for the water, but we hung out on the beach for the rest of the day, reading our books and I even went to sleep for a while! We stuck around until 7pm so that we could watch the sun set behind Lanai… And that was just a regular Saturday. CRAZY!!!!
P.S. We took lots of pictures, I’ll be posting some in the next few days (and I’m guessing Kara might put some up on her site as well).
The newest entry on my ever-growing “Why I love living in Hawaii” list:
Wearing slippers (aka flip-flops) to work -- There’s something wonderful about being free from shoes. Whenever I sit at my desk, my slippers come off and I'm more footloose than Kevin Bacon!
I've gone back and added links to pictures in my Upcountry post. See, when I first released the post, I didn't have the resources I needed to make it the post that I envisioned. So instead of moving on, and making new posts, I decided to devote my future creative energy on revising the same old post. And that was just the beginning! Wait until I start photoshopping dewbacks and droids into the backgrounds of all the pictures! And once I get done hacking up that post, I’ll start making crappy prequel posts. Oh you just wait, I will build an empire on that one post.
I recently sent this letter to Liz Enthusiasm, lead singer of Freezepop:
Hi Liz,
My wife and I need your help! See, we're fans of Freezepop; we've got every CD, I bought a Science Genius Girl tanktop for my wife and it's all worn out from her wearing it so much! So far so good! But here's where the story gets sad. :(
We recently moved to Maui (ok, that part isn't sad) but we couldn't bring all of our stuff. So we left a bunch of boxes in Portland, which included our CD collection . But, I was smart, I copied all of our CDs onto my laptop so our tunes came along... except for ONE CD! Somehow Fashion Impression Function got skipped! Noooooo....
I downloaded the two shared mp3s on your site today, but I'm kinda wondering if you would take pity on us and send us mp3s for the rest of the songs? We'd only borrow them and send them back once we got our CD from Portland! If ya could, we'd love you forever (ok, we already do) but we'd show it by letting you crash on our futon for a weekend! We'll even show you around the island if you want? :) Sadly Swedie couldn't come, there's a 3 month quarantine for doggies (no matter how cute!)
Well there's my plea. I understand if you can't send me pirated copies of your own music... the fun was in the asking!
Jake
Last Thursday I got this response:
Hey Jake,
Doh! Well, I guess I can only send you a song at a time because of the file sizes, but here goes.
And hey, I'll definitely look you up next time we're in Maui!
cheers,
Liz E.
Attached was Manipulate.mp3... today I got a second email with Lazy.mp3. How cool is that???
As of yesterday afternoon, Kara and I are officially certified to SCUBA dive! I’ve got plenty to say about the experience, but for now check out this picture.
One of Kara’s friends from Portland has been staying with us this past week. She wanted to go to a luau, so on Tuesday night we all went to the Old Lahaina Luau. This is the first luau that we’ve been to since we moved here, and it was lots of fun.
Luaus have always been a bittersweet experience for me; there’s nothing better than experiencing music, hula dancing, delicious Hawaiian food, and the warm evening breeze. All of your senses are inundated with many pleasurable things and you can’t help but be lulled into a foggy dreamland. For those few hours, you are living in a fantasy. But, always pecking at the back of your mind is “… and I have to leave this and fly back home in 2 more days.”
As the luau on Tuesday started winding down, I started feeling the usual sadness. It was an automatic reaction, I have been trained that the end of a luau means a soon departure from the islands. “But wait,” I thought, “this time you don’t have to leave.” And yet there were so many people at the luau that WOULD have to leave soon. That realization made me even sadder for some reason. I suppose I was projecting my feelings about Hawaii onto all of them...
Now if only I could describe what my feelings about Hawaii actually are… I guess now I have a topic for my next post.
Well I AM working on a post about my history with Hawaii... but it's taking a little while to write.
Meanwhile I fixed the problem where posting comments takes for-freaking-ever! After looking around a bit, I discovered that the problem was with the category archive pages... See, any time you leave a comment, it rebuilds the front page and all of the appropriate archive pages... Well since all of my main blog entries are in the category 'Entry' there is a GIANT archive page that has to be reconstructed before your comment is posted. Since no one ever even looks at that page, it was clearly a retarded setup... So, I've changed that page so that it's dynamically generated. That's only a good solution because no one ever goes there, because now it takes like 15 seconds for that page to load! Since I don't actually want to encourage anyone to visit that page, I won't link to it here! (but if you look at the paths of other category archive pages, you probably can figure out the URL...)
Also of note is the stagnant currents sidebar... I've watched almost 10 movies since X3, I just haven't bothered entering them in. The movie lookup app is somewhat helpful, but it still takes too many manual steps to get the image uploaded to my server... So, I'm planning on adding FTP-ability to the app... Since I already did FTP stuff in C# for a project at e***, it shouldn't be all that difficult to add it in! Then hopefully I can just enter the movie name, and it'll automatically retrieve the picture and upload it to my site! Someday...
Wait, my currents are updated? Could it be?? Yep, I updated my movie lookup tool to do the whole FTP thing... This feature was a long time coming, since I originally mentioned it back in March of 2005! The project stalled out because there wasn’t a built-in FTP Request class in .NET 1.1. But, .NET 2.0 DOES have it! YAY!!!
So, now I only have to type in a movie name, hit ‘Find’ and if everything looks good, I hit the ‘Upload’ button. The image is pulled down from the source webpage, and uploaded to my server! Then I just copy the displayed text into a new blog post, and BAM!
I love being a programmer...
Well, I couldn’t stop tinkering with my program… Now, there is a built in preview pane which is populated as soon as a match is found. This pretty much makes the ‘Preview’ button obsolete, but I’ve left it in for now. I also did some refactoring of the code; I was never really happy with how I handled the different media types, so now there is a separate class that handles all of that junk. I still have plans to rework the underlying ‘data structure’ (in quotes because all it is now is a set of string arrays) so that the related strings are more tightly bundled.
I was thinking that I might actually make a more configurable version of this thing if there’s any interest out there… Right now the source has my ftp account/user/pass hardcoded in, so it’s not much use to others!
